My Year of Meats (20 page)

The next few days seemed like a dream—astonishing and senseless. I tried to track down Dr. Ingvortsen’s records, but they had been lost or destroyed in the fire. It was thirty years ago, after all. I searched Ma’s files and medicine cabinets but didn’t expect to find anything. I didn’t tell her about the DES. Maybe I should have, but I figured what good would it do? She would only feel guilty. She couldn’t really offer me solace. We just didn’t have that type of relationship. Later in the week we talked again.

“Ma, I have to tell you. I don’t know if I can keep the baby....”

She shook her head. “You keep, you throw away. Always you do only what you want. Not thinking about other people. What his father say?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know father?” She turned away from me. “You are wicked girl.”

“No, Ma. I know who the father is. I just haven’t told him.”

“He nice man?” She turned back hopefully.

“I don’t ... I mean, yes, I guess he’s a nice man.”

“You tell him, then he marry you? Maybe?”

“No, Ma. I don’t think so.”

“Then he not nice man and is better you throw away his baby.” She narrowed her narrow eyes at me. “But you not sure, right?” she persisted.

“That’s right, Ma. I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all.”

 

 

It is my job to be sure about things. Every day, I must reassure my crew, my wives, the local sheriff who’s about to arrest us for trespassing, or treason, or public intoxication ... that really, sir, ma’am, everything is just fine, under control, the check is on the way, in the bank, whatever. I have an honest, earnest face. It’s the Asian-American Woman thing—we’re reliable, loyal, smart but nonthreatening. This is why we get to do so much newscasting in America. It’s a convenient precedent. The average American is trained to believe what I tell him.

It can also be an occupational hazard. I am so good at convincing people that I know exactly what I am doing, I end up fooling myself.

But here is a truth, regarding Sloan.

At first he was a lark, primarily funny. I was twenty-seven when Emil and I got divorced. For two years afterward I didn’t date at all. My relationship with my body had been irrevocably altered by my failure to conceive. With a shriveled uterus and a predisposition to cancer, I was not in the mood for love. I was deformed, barren, and scared. I suspected I might die young, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to view sex as recreational again. Sex was about precision and despair, the antitheses of pleasure. It was a production, and I was the director and had run it ruthlessly. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe my little egg, in the middle of her placid descent, simply recoiled in horror when she saw these beleaguered genetic envoys, joyless and exhausted, bushwhacking their way up my tortuous reproductive tract. So when they finally arrived and came knocking, she slammed her door, and there they died, defeated in the murky, lukewarm threshold of becoming.

Anyway, two years after the divorce, a girlfriend told me about Sloan. He was a good friend of hers. They used to discuss their sexual proclivities, as did she and I, and in a magnanimous curatorial gesture of friendship, she suggested to both of us that we might like to fuck. She thought we’d have a lot to talk about.

She was right. We had that long prelude by telephone, and by the time we finally met, in Nebraska, we had talked so much and my defenses were so far down that the sudden embodiment of sex shook me.

What hooked me was the suspicion that he was not equivalently shaken. This is not easy to admit. But I sensed it. Perhaps his sexual mastery and my abandonment indicated nothing more than the discrepancy in our desire. I should say, the goals of that desire: I am pretty sure that our enjoyment was on a par—at least he told me as much, and I had no reason to disbelieve him, but I soon suspected that we just didn’t want the same things to come of it.

I started to realize that the world Sloan roamed was much larger and richer than mine. Although we normally met on my turf, small backwaters you could reach only by pickup truck or Greyhound bus, on a couple of occasions when I was in transit we met in L.A., which was one of his towns. He knew that I loved food. He took me to exquisite restaurants, where we ate rich urchin roe that melted like butter, and paper-thin
fugu
with chili
ponzu
sauce, and a thimbleful of black-market caviar, wrapped in a translucent skin and tied with a chive, then covered with trembling pieces of gold leaf; it was called a Beggar’s Purse and each one cost fifty dollars. After weeks of Denny’s, I loved it.

He knew people. Everywhere we went. People whose names and faces I recognized but whom I had never seen in person before. Musicians. Film people. I got the sense he was showing me off, and I began to wonder if perhaps I wasn’t primarily a rustic curiosity, a story he recounted to his friends or his therapist. It was a point of pride with me to show up in his world covered in mud and chiggers, with torn jeans and a filthy T-shirt, traipsing cow dung across the cropped carpets of the Chateau Marmont. He liked this. I never had the right clothes, and he would take me shopping and buy me things so we could go out to dinner, and then he would take them off me later on. He had a few stores that he knew well—I mean,
really
knew: the collections, the designers, the girls. I got it. I am not stupid. Just underdressed.

This type of relationship was normally not my style, but then again, nothing was normal in the Year of Meats.

The episode in Fly undid me. The almost accidental conversation about trust released all these unexpected hopes. I’d thought they were all dead. That’s the thing about involuntary infertility—it kills your sense of a future, so you hide out in the here and now. Of course, lots of people choose a child-free life. But when you don’t get to choose, when it is thrust upon you, you equate the loss of posterity with the loss of hope.

So there in Fly, I was overcome with this soft and screwy sense of hopefulness, followed by this titanic sex that laid me out, and when I came to, all these ifs were flying around, blackening the air like an infestation. When they cleared, they left me looking squarely at a brand-new desire. After resolutely keeping him at a distance, suddenly I knew that Sloan was important. He meant something to me. I’m not sure why, but I wanted him at the center of my life, not just orbiting its periphery like a spare moon.

That dank, moldy room by the interstate was a threshold of sorts. After the sex was over, we lay in the middle of the spongy mattress, and my heart pounded and swelled with all this massing, nebulous expectation. His head was on my chest, and he lifted it and shifted slightly, as though he’d felt the pulse of it too.

“Takagi?”

“Yes ...”

“Thanks.”

“Uh ... sure.”

He rolled over onto his side and propped his head on his hand and looked at me.

“Jane, when you said you didn’t get pregnant, that you were safe ... ?”

“Yes?”

“Are you sure? I mean, what exactly did you mean?”

I didn’t want to tell him at first. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that he wouldn’t take me seriously if he knew. And I wanted him to take me seriously. As seriously as I was taking him. And that’s when I realized I had to tell him.

“Sloan, I can’t have kids.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I was married, remember? We tried, I got tested, nothing. Zip. That’s what broke us up, finally.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well ...”

“Thanks. For telling me.”

“Well, I guess you should know.”

He rolled over onto his back. “You know, I’ve never had sex without a condom before. I’ve always wondered what it feels like, but what with AIDS and paternity suits and all ... I’ve never had a lover who was perfectly safe....”

And that was that. What it all boiled down to. A discrepancy in desire. He wanted a simple answer to a nagging question, like scratching an itch. I wanted something else. With Sloan, for the first time in so long, I wanted more. But no. Not to be safe. Not
perfectly safe.
That was not at all what I wanted.

It was the strangest thing. As I stared up at the stained acoustic ceiling tile, the tears started to leak from the corners of my eyes. This had happened to me once before, when I was in the hospital after the operation and the doctor showed me the X-ray of the imploded forehead of my uterus and its decrepit curling horns. The tears for my thwarted posterity just ran down the sides of my face, into my ears, and onto the pillow. I wasn’t crying, really. Rather, life and all my stupid hopes for the future were simply draining out of me. And in Fly it happened again. I couldn’t make the tears stop. After a while, Sloan got up to go to the bathroom and noticed.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Sloan, really,” I reassured him, in a perfectly normal, reliable voice. “Everything is just fine.”

 

 

“Really, Ma, I’m fine.” She stands on the porch watching me as I carry my suitcase to the rental car parked in the driveway. She is worried, I can tell. But what can I say to her? I told her about the neoplasia, just to get her used to the idea that I might not be as durable as she imagines. But from what I’d read about DES, and what I’d seen of my imploded uterus, I can’t promise to have the baby at all, even if I wanted it, which I’m not at all sure I do. And I certainly can’t promise to marry Sloan. But at least I will tell him, I promise her. Before I abort I will tell the nice green man, just to see what he says. “Ma,” I say to her as I lean way down to kiss her good-bye on the top of her gray head. “Don’t worry. Everything will be just fine.”

Returning from the Midwest to New York is like driving full speed into a wall. The city slams you. Middle America is all about drift and suspension. It’s the pervasiveness of the mall-culture mentality; all of life becomes an aimless wafting on currents of synthesized sound, through the well-conditioned air. In New York, you walk down the streets like that, you’re dead meat.

I slipped back into the city and spent a week at home pretending I was still out of town. I made appointments with an obstetrician for an ultrasound and an oncologist to check my uterus for more malignant forms of life, and then I unplugged the phone, got down on my knees, and cleaned every corner of my tiny apartment. It’s a ritual I perform every year. I go through all my possessions, touching each, one by one. I reconsider everything I own and either choose it again or throw it away. It’s a deterrent to shopping, and stuff stays special that way.

My apartment is small but fits me perfectly: a long, slim railroad with tall ceilings, exposed brick walls, and broad oak-plank floors. The walls are decorated with
hanga
wood-block prints and some old hand-tinted photos of my Japanese relatives that I’d gotten from my aunt in Tokyo. Some of my furniture had belonged to them too: a lacquered chest of drawers inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a low table made from a slab of twisted ironwood, polished to a rich, knotty glow. Mixed with these were the things from Grampa Little’s side. A scarred wood-and-enamel kitchen sideboard from the farm. Grammy’s pink double-globe lamps with their hand-painted flowers and the lace table runners that her mother crocheted. An old love seat and a couple of milking stools from the farm that Grampa couldn’t bear to throw away, even though he hadn’t used them for milking in several decades.

At the end of my week of reevaluation, I emerged and walked over to the office to announce my return. Souvenir exchange is a ritual glue in Japanese offices, and I’d bought shot glasses for the American researchers and refrigerator magnets for the Japanese staff. We were aiming for complete sets in both categories from all fifty states. The shot glasses said “Indiana—The Hoosier State,” and the magnets had the slogan “Crossroads of America” emblazoned across the top and a cartoon of a baffled-looking Japanese tourist reading a crossroads sign with some of the more colorful Indiana town names—Brazil, Holland, Mexico, Peru, Alexandria, Delphi, Carthage, Gnaw Bone, Pinhook, Popcorn, and Santa Claus—written on rickety wooden arrows that pointed in all directions.

My desk was covered with mail, faxes, and Post-it phone messages. There were brochures from PR firms representing small-town tourist interests, faxes from film commissions, and a couple of messages from Suzie Flowers, which I tossed in the trash. She had been calling me regularly ever since the shoot. Kenji told her the program had been canceled, but she persisted, saying she wanted some of the footage even if the show hadn’t aired. I felt bad, but it was Kenji’s job to deal with her.

The two faxes that I was interested in were pinned to my bulletin board. One was from my mole at the Japanese Network and the other was from John Ueno. I read the mole’s fax first.